Yandex Self-Driving Taxi Is Very Smooth

The Yandex self-driving taxi gave some very smooth and very convincing rides to tech journalists at CES in Las Vegas. Although the route was pre-mapped by the company, check out the smooth driving and visualization starting around 3:15.

"Prior to CES 2019, the Yandex team acquired a local car and outfitted it with the right hardware and sensors for self-driving operation. The total process, from obtaining the local car to mapping a route, took roughly 30 days to complete.

Once the car was ready, the team used Yandex’s mapping tech to build a personalized HD map of the area around the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The proprietary self-driving software stack was then optimized to adapt to the city’s driving conditions. This test route had the self-driving car handle busy traffic, unprotected left-hand turns, and pedestrians while driving up to 45 mph."

Fans of Arthur C. Clarke are ecstatic, having read his Imperial Earth about forty years ago:

As the beautiful old car cruised in almost perfect silence under the guidance of it's automatic controls, Duncan tried to see something of the terrain through which she was passing. The spaceport was 50 km from the city - no one had yet invented a noiseless rocket - and the four-lane highway bore a surprising amount of traffic...

The big car was slowing down, it's computer brain sensing an exit ahead. Presently it peeled off from the parkway, then speeded up again along a narrow road..